AMD has been busy sharing details on all things Zen 5 with select press at an exclusive Los Angeles event. Club386 was present and our key takeaway, once all the inevitable AI chatter had passed, is that AMD’s in bullish mood ahead of a hugely important release.
With Zen 4 having struggled to galvanise sales, enthusiasts are eager to see Zen 5 up the ante. An entire new roster of chips arrives in a little over two weeks – July 31 to be precise – and entry-level Ryzen 5 9600X could be the joker in the pack.
Pricing, sadly, is yet to be confirmed, but we do have confirmed specifications and an interesting early look at benchmark performance.
Ryzen 5 9600X is a frugal 65W processor packing six cores and 12 threads alongside a top speed of 5.4GHz and 38MB of onboard cache. A relatively modest configuration, you might think, yet generational beneath-the-hood advancements create healthy uplifts with regards to real-world performance.
In-house numbers should always be taken with a pinch of salt, yet AMD chose to pit Ryzen 5 9600X against Intel’s incumbent Core i5-14600K and reckons there is only one winner. Performance in a wide range of productivity benchmarks is up by an average of 17%, and with specific optimisations, those gains go from healthy to jaw-dropping.
Handbrake is such an outlier, where AMD claims Zen 5’s math-intensive improvements amount to a whopping 94% performance leap over its immediate rival.
Gaming benchmarks aren’t quite so heady, yet numbers here aren’t to be scoffed at, either. Test results from half-a-dozen titles reveal an average uptick of 14%.
The performance needle continues to edge in the right direction but of equal importance, AMD holds sway in the efficiency department. Ryzen 5 9600X at 65W TDP is said to handsomely defeat the 125W Core i5-14600K while running cooler than ever before.
We’re looking forward to putting those claims to the test independently, but at this early juncture, consider us enthused. At the very least, folk contemplating an imminent upgrade ought to wait a couple of weeks to see how it all pans out.
